With the inexorable push toward autonomous road vehicles by companies such as Tesla Motors and Google, there is an urgent need to make roadways ‘smart’ and to connect vehicles’ computer systems to one another and to their surroundings, infrastructure, and ecosystem. The effective integration of these systems is a major challenge for companies and government agencies. We examine the state of current and evolving systems and communications with respect to in-vehicle (IV), vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-surroundings (V2S), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-ecosystem (V2E). We define the term ‘surroundings’ as the immediate vicinity of a vehicle; ‘infrastructure’ as the local area, such as a municipality or nearby countryside; and ‘ecosystem’ as distant facilities, such as the Internet, the Cloud, and call centers. We postulate that, for self-driving road vehicles to be fully effective, these efforts must progress together, and selected approaches must be standardized, preferably globally, so that diverse systems can be readily integrated into systems-of-systems. Failure to make such advances across the board will hamper the design, development, and deployment of the many safety-critical systems in need of integration. We suggest how to introduce such technologies, taking into consideration the latest advances and the cost and ease of implementation and support.